LWIO Watch: Weeks 4 and 5 ending February 13, 2009

I’m sorry that I missed Week 4. It was a phenomenal week where we’ve made huge breakthroughs.

First, Sriram (our SMB server guy) and Jerry (our Posix virtual file system guy) got to make the copy file scenario work. What this means is that you can login to your Windows XP client machine, net use to your favorite lwio Linux file server connect to it and copy files from the server or to the server.

The named pipe file system is fully functional (I’m the owner of the named pipe file system driver ). We’re shipping a named pipe client and a named pipe server and you can fire them up and send a bunch of traffic to the server which then echoes the traffic back to you. We support a single pipe, single instance server, a single pipe multiple instance server and a multiple pipe, multiple instance server as well.

Based on the named pipe client and server code, Sriram took the named pipe client code and ported it to Windows. We can now run the named pipe client on a Windows box that talks to our named pipe server running on the Linux server through SMB traffic. Enough said!

But that wasn’t good enough for us! Brian Koropoff retrofitted DCE/RPC to support client and server side named pipes to work. The first scenario we got running was the venerable DCE/RPC echo program working both client and server running on Linux on the same box.

Next he changed the client piece to go over our SMB redirector file system. So we had a Linux client talking named pipes over our SMB client stack to our SMB server which passed it to our named pipe file system which in turn passed it back to our DCE/RPC server runtime. RPC over named pipes fully working!!

Still not impressed! Brian then ported the client RPC named pipes echo program on to Windows and yesterday we were able to successfully demonstrate an MSRPC named pipe client program talking to a DCE/RPC named pipe echo server running on our Linux server

We’re almost there! We started working on this SMB infrastructure on January 2nd – after the holidays. Its February 13th today and we’ve made some pretty great progress

By the way, we’ve finished branching our source trees last week. We now have 5.0 in archive mode, 5.1 which will be our current stable production release and our latest bleeding edge functionality is in trunk -5.2! Stay tuned lwio is now 5.2 and we’re going as fast as we can to get this puppy out before summer.

Thanks for reading!